69 Bourke St ... the real estate bargain of 1895

BY BARRY GITTINS

If you were a shrewd advocate and activist who wanted to be within cooee of the Victorian premier’s digs at parliament on Spring Street, and also Melbourne’s Lord Mayor on Swanston Street, where would you look to buy property?

If you were a morals crusader and social change agent who wanted to situate your operations within walking distance of the opium dens and brothels of Exhibition, Little Bourke and Little Lonsdale streets, and ‘Chinatown’, where would you set up shop?

What if you held religious services and wanted premises to attract the poor and the wealthy, the workers and the toffs, the young and the aged, all streaming in and out of Melbourne’s Central Business District?

The answer to these queries, as The Salvation Army discovered, was high up on Bourke Street; now recognised as 69 Bourke Street to be precise.

Some 130 years ago, in an 1895 issue of The Officer, The Salvation Army reported that “our Australian comrades have just entered their new Territorial Headquarters, and have had a series of very successful demonstrations in connection with the same”.

The grand building had been built in 1890 for the YMCA, and the Army had previously held meetings in it as the YMCA’s paying guests. Sadly, the severe financial recession of the 1890s led to the banks foreclosing on the YMCA in 1894.

The building through the years ... from modern-day, the 1960s and at the turn of the 20th century.

The Salvos put their hand up to purchase it and took possession in 1895.

“The building is magnificently suited to the purpose of [our] Australasian headquarters,” the article continued.

“Besides the various suites of offices, it contains accommodation for the printing press, besides a large, beautiful hall to seat 1200 people, and a smaller hall.”

The Salvation Army faced a weighty price for what became the Melbourne City Temple; the land alone cost 30,000 pounds, and the building another 25,000 pounds; the Army’s offer of 19,000 pounds was accepted (a far cry from the required 55,000 pounds), “to be paid by instalments extending over ten years”.

With the exception of the COVID-19 years, when the building often had to help people through a servery window in Westwood Place and a ‘triage’ front desk in the vestibule, people have entered what is now Melbourne Project 614 for 130 years; eating, singing, praying, laughing, confiding, and receiving practical and spiritual support in numerous ways.

That real estate bargain in 1895 has paid off handsomely for The Salvation Army and Australians.